I've just began using this method but I've forgotten a lot of what it entails. What is the optimal wait time before trying to write out the vocab translations? How many reps are necessary before you have a good grasp of the words you are trying to learn? etc

I'd appreciate any information you guys could offer on the subject.

But I thought you were already fluent?

igordesu Wrote:But I thought you were already fluent?

Depends on the language

You know anything about this method?

You should probably ask Iversen himself if there's some info you can't find about the method on the How-to-Learn-Any-Language forums.

yukamina Wrote:You should probably ask Iversen himself if there's some info you can't find about the method on the How-to-Learn-Any-Language forums.

It funny you mention that, as it just occurred to me to look there.

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...PN=1&TPN=2

I found this thread that links to other threads. I'm still reading on it.

Oh, I thought Iversen was someone famous who had written a book or something, I had no idea it was some guy on a forum. I've never really looked around the forum, has he actually proved that he can actively speak and use those languages? I realize it's just European languages, but it still sounds quite amazing, especially since his techniques SHOULDN'T really work according to most theories.

What is this method? How does it work?

bombpersons Wrote:What is this method? How does it work?

I've read the wiki several times and I still don't know. From what I gather:
Take 7 or so words you don't know from a dictionary. Write them in a column. Write the translations (in English or whatever) in a column on the right of it. Hold over the first column and translate back. Hold over the second column and do it again from the other direction. Keep doing this while waiting some between translations.

This extremely simple and basic idea should, according to Iverson fans, allow you to learn 200 words in like 2 hours.

Tobberoth Wrote:This extremely simple and basic idea should, according to Iverson fans, allow you to learn 200 words in like 2 hours.

Don't know if that's true, but using this technique to learn words and Anki to review them, I think, should make things go a lot smoother. Smoother than what I was doing before, at least (using anki to try to learn words as well).

bombpersons Wrote:What is this method? How does it work?

Fwiw, the most succinct general description on the Learn Any Language site:

http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Word_lists

So it's effectively using very small intervals to begin with (so that you learn the words short term), then using anki to learn them long term?

Perhaps you could do the same thing having a temporary cram deck and then once finished import it into your real anki deck?

I have a friend that used it for learning Greek. He dismissed it after learning about SRSs.

From reading it, it looks like the key is to batch up 7 vocab words (which you can get from something you're reading, and finding the first 7 words you don't know; or for more advanced learning you can just grab 7 words from the dictionary) write down the foreign words in a column, and then make sure you know all 7 answers before writing down (or checking) the answer (translate back to non-foreign language). Then do the same thing back into the foreign language as a review. To review again, go from L1 to L2. If you end up not knowing one item, and you go to look it up, you don't write down the answer right away, but you wait for the next review and do all 7 again as a batch. It appears to be a method both drill a large amount of vocab but at the same time to get you to use your long term memory, not short term. I think it also gets you to have another impression of the other 7 words in the set. 7 is also a small enough number that you can start of with it in your shorter term memory for the first round, without getting overloaded. Long term memory is also the goal of a spaced repetition software. I guess you could do this method to learn the first 2 days and then put them in Anki... seems like you should put 1 word on each card in Anki and not keep it as a batch anymore.

I can't think of anything this method does that isn't done better with Anki sentence cards and their variations.

However, for people who like to have only Japanese on their cards, they could perhaps use this to really drill into their minds a fuzzy monolingual awareness of the vocabulary's meanings before adding them to Anki in various forms?

nest0r Wrote:I can't think of anything this method does that isn't done better with Anki sentence cards and their variations.

That's why I'm just using for initial learning. Drivers99's post sums up what my intentions with this method are.

How it works isn't very obvious from the Wiki, but the idea is you write down the first 5-10 words in English first. Then you memorise them, how you do that is up to you. Only one you do can remember perfectly do you do the translation, and then translate back again. It works as a control method, basically sometimes you think you know the words, but when you try write them, you find you often don't know them. Just writing the words down does nothing btw. I guess it's similar to doing recognition/production (with typing in the answer) in Anki.

Iversen himself has an interesting method of learning languages. He takes a dictionary and goes through it alphabetically learning between 5000-10000 words (making sure he takes it with context). While doing this he reads through basic grammar books. The object is start reading in the target language as quickly as possible, but he doesn't want to sit looking up new words all the time. He has a gigantic log where he posts in multiple languages. Somewhere he has a post linking to all his most interesting posts which are worth reading, but I can't seem to find it now.

travis Wrote:How it works isn't very obvious from the Wiki, but the idea is you write down the first 5-10 words in English first. Then you memorise them, how you do that is up to you. Only one you do can remember perfectly do you do the translation, and then translate back again. It works as a control method, basically sometimes you think you know the words, but when you try write them, you find you often don't know them. Just writing the words down does nothing btw. I guess it's similar to doing recognition/production (with typing in the answer) in Anki.

So you start with L1 first? Oh, Crappoze....

Reminds me of the iknow procedure ...

If you read his posts in the superfast vocabulary methods thread he gives a couple of examples. It's worth reading his posts over the first few pages of the thread.

I just want people to know, his Swedish is quite bad.

SW: Jag lyssnar just nu til den geografiska tävlingen "På spåret" på SVT 1. Två lagen tävler om att känna igen geografiska orter sett fra tåg i og utanför folkhemmet Sverige. Tåget körer, og när man tror at man har igenkännt ett sted drar man i nödbromsan - ju tidligare, dess fler poäng. Därtil kommar några almena frågor om de besökta lokalitetar. Men triumf triumf: musiken i bakgrunnet er dansk, - det är Köpenhamns Jernvägs-ång-galopp (Københavns Jernbane-Dampgalop) av H.C.Lumbye! Just nu är tåget på väg mot Trondheim i Norge, med frågor om Nidarosdomen, Mette-Marits äkta maka, namnet på själva området (Trøndelag) og stednamnet knyttat til den norske forfatningen (Eidsvoll) Den sista frågan blev besvarat omedelbart av det ena laget: Hanoi (maximum - tio poäng!).

He mixes it up with Danish and Norwegian constantly. For a Danish person, I'm not impressed, not that he has claimed he's fluent in Swedish, but still. Since his whole approach is to learn just words, it's surprising how many of the words are incorrect. og? stedsnamnet? til? norske? forfatningen? tidligare?

@tobberoth

That's interesting. Sad too. However, I'm not so interested in his language ability as I am in his memorization technique. How are these word incorrect? Spelled incorrectly? Used wrong? Both?

Tobberoth Wrote:He mixes it up with Danish and Norwegian constantly. For a Danish person, I'm not impressed, not that he has claimed he's fluent in Swedish, but still. Since his whole approach is to learn just words, it's surprising how many of the words are incorrect. og? stedsnamnet? til? norske? forfatningen? tidligare?

I can't comment on his fluency but his approach to learning is to read the target language, not memorise words. He just prefers to do so beforehand, so he doesn't have to look them up all the time. Obviously there are lots of people who think it's a stupid method (and have said so), but if it works for him, why not?

Somewhere in the forum he talks about which languages he's good at, and which are active and which are passive. I'd imagine though when you get to 11 languages it'd be difficult to find time just to maintain all of them.

kazelee Wrote:@tobberoth

That's interesting. Sad too. However, I'm not so interested in his language ability as I am in his memorization technique. How are these word incorrect? Spelled incorrectly? Used wrong? Both?

For most of them, the words aren't even Swedish. og is Danish for and, the Swedish word is "och". "til" is Danish, Swedish being "till". This is true for most of the errors I pointed out, implying that he simply doesn't know when a word is Swedish or Danish, which could definitely be a problem stemming from his lack of sentence based learning (IMO).

That isn't the only problem though, his grammar is off.

Två lagen tävler om att känna igen geografiska orter sett fra tåg i og utanför folkhemmet Sverige.
Should be:
Två lag tävlar om att känna igen geografiska orter som de ser från tåg i och utanför Sverige.

You might think it's just misspelled words again, but it isn't. First of all, the word order is odd for Swedish, which is why I had to add "som de ser från" where he simply has "sett fra". A native Swede would probably not have constructed the sentence like that. As for "folkhemmet", I'm not even sure what he means. Folkhemmet IS a Swedish word, but we NEVER use it, it was used by politicians during the second world war. I GUESS he means hemlandet, but it's hard to say, that word simply shouldn't be present in the sentence. "Två lagen tävler" is also simply not a spelling error, he's saying "two the teams" instead of "two teams".

Simply put, it feels like he only knows advanced words, with very little grasp of basic grammar. He's simply using Swedish words in Danish grammar.

I mine all of my Swedish from the Muppet Show.

@tobberoth

So his memorization is good, it's the grammar and usage that is off? If so, that's no problem.

@Jarvik7

Friggin lol.